Ingster: Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)

Stranger on the Third Floor is a fascinating comparison between what it means to be a screwball eyewitness and what it means to be a noir eyewitness. It opens in screwball mode, with fast-talking reporter Mike Ward (John McGuire) providing the key testimony in a high-profile murder case. Within this comic, conversational universe, Mike is absolutely certain he has identified the right man. Upon returning to his apartment, however, he encounters a mysterious “stranger” (Peter Lorre) who seems connected with the murder in some way. As night falls, it becomes clear that the stranger is the killer and that he's somehow managed to distort Mike's perception of the crime scene. It’s at this point that Ingster introduces the distorted perspectives of classic noir, turning the apartment complex into a forerunner of the great noir cityscapes of the 1940s. Although the stranger’s power is never clarified, it feels as if he’s somehow managed to erect an alternative, dystopian city between his crimes and their eyewitnesses. In order to catch the stranger, then, Mike has to traverse this alternative city – and that’s risky, since it means subsuming himself into its compositions and sightlines, until he finds himself accused of the very murder he witnessed. Meanwhile, the stranger largely eludes the camera, hovering around the fringes of perception like Lorre’s performance in M. As that might suggest, it’s as much late Expressionism as early noir, shot through with an almost supernatural terror – by the end, it feels like noir xenophobia is just an indirect response to the strangeness of this new city, and the self-strangeness of anyone who spends too much time in it. And that means that noir emerges as a late flowering of silent cinema, a return to silence after the cacaphonous conversations of screwball, the sound genre par excellence. It’s no coincidence that Ingster’s noir schemes put an end to dialogue, relegating it to flashbacks and dream sequences, as Mike’s’s tortured inner monologue propels the rest of the film. In doing so, it conflates strangeness and silence – it’s precisely Lorre’s silence that makes him strange – until the noir city emerges as a new kind of hush, a silence beneath the silence of the everyday city, that’s even more stifling than the silence of silent cinema, because it comes after the revelations of screwball sound.